Top 200 Charles de Lint Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The past scampers like an alleycat through the present, leaving the paw prints of memories scattered helter-skelter – here ink is smeared on a page, there lies an old photograph with a chewed corner, elsewhere still, a nest has been made of old newspapers, the headlines running one into the other to make strange declarations.”

— Charles de Lint

152. “The real trouble comes from not knowing what we really want in the first place.”

— Charles de Lint

153. “By enlarging your knowledge of things, you will find your knowledge of self is enlarged.”

— Charles de Lint

154. “Sculptors, poets, painters, musicians – they’re the traditional purveyors of Beauty. But it can as easily be created by a gardener, a farmer, a plumber, a careworker. It’s the intent you put into your work, the pride you take in it – whatever it is.”

— Charles de Lint

155. “Lies were like having a pregnant rabbit. One day you had one, but before you knew it, there were rabbits all over the place.”

— Charles de Lint

156. “A body of work may be reviled – mostly by those who have no knowledge of its workings – and yet still carry elements of what can only be considered eternal truths.”

— Charles de Lint

157. “I’ve always been interested in the outsider.”

— Charles de Lint

158. “I find the characters in my head and the more I write about them, the better I get to know them.”

— Charles de Lint

159. “If we can only remember what we are and what we can do, nobody can bind us or control us.”

— Charles de Lint

160. “Life and death are only different positions on the wheel.”

— Charles de Lint

161. “Everything can talk,” the old woman replied. “The trick is, not everybody knows how to listen.”

— Charles de Lint

162. “She should have gotten a dog instead of having a kid. Dogs are easy to train and they like being led around on a leash.”

— Charles de Lint

163. “As far as I’m concerned, the only difference between fact and what most people call fiction is about fifteen pages in the dictionary.”

— Charles de Lint

164. “Dying doesn’t end anything – it just changes where you are.”

— Charles de Lint

165. “Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek. – Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume.”

— Charles de Lint

166. “But life isn’t ours to keep. We only get to hold it for a little bit and then we’ve got to pass it on.”

— Charles de Lint

167. “The problem with children is that you have to put up with their parents.”

— Charles de Lint

168. “Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher worlds of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend. – attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven.”

— Charles de Lint

169. “It’s a mistake to go poking about in your own past,” she’d told her. “It makes you shrink into yourself. Every time you return you get smaller and more transparent. Go back often enough and you might vanish altogether. We’re meant to put the past behind us and be the people we are now, Izzy, not who we were.”

— Charles de Lint

170. “I’m not as trusting as people think I am. Sure, I see the best in people, but that doesn’t mean it’s really there.”

— Charles de Lint

171. “A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.”

— Charles de Lint

172. “Maybe there’s something you can learn from being a cat instead of a little girl.” “What.”

— Charles de Lint

173. “What was it Dylan said? You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.”

— Charles de Lint

174. “Though the three of them were unrelated by blood, they were sisters all the same. In the heart, where it mattered.”

— Charles de Lint

175. “Everybody’s got to make a buck – the trick is, either find something you like to do, or do something to pay the rent that doesn’t take too much out of you. Capisce?”

— Charles de Lint

176. “Has no one ever explained to you,” Consuela said, “that there is no such thing as linear time? What people call the past, the present, the future – it’s all happening at the same time.”

— Charles de Lint

177. “She’s old, is Granny Weather, he says, and cranky, too, but there’s more magic in one of her toenails than most of us will find in a lifetime.”

— Charles de Lint

178. “Change wasn’t necessarily bad. It was just scary.”

— Charles de Lint

179. “But most of us strive for harmony. The fact that we can fall into the darkness is what makes our choice to reach for the light such a precious thing.”

— Charles de Lint

180. “All she knew was that there was more to the world than what could be perceived with the five senses, and that she couldn’t accept that Mystery as having its source in some power-hungry god whose church’s creeds were based on denial of all secular matters, as though the beauty of this world was not a thing to be cherished for its own sake, but was rather a testing ground for how one would or would not be rewarded in the afterlife.”

— Charles de Lint

181. “The trouble with magic is that there’s too much it just can’t fix. When things go wrong, glimpsing junkyard faerie and crows that can turn into girls and back again doesn’t help much. The useful magic’s never at hand. The three wishes and the genies in bottles, seven-league boots, invisible cloaks and all. They stay in stories, while out here in the wide world we have to muddle through as best we can on our own.”

— Charles de Lint

182. “I’m not saying that they had to be handicapped to share their gifts with us, but if they hadn’t been handicapped, maybe they would have gone on to be other people and not become the inspirations or creative people they came to be.”

— Charles de Lint

183. “The thing to remember when you’re writing,” he said, ” is, it’s not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It’s whether it wakes a truth in your reader. I don’t care what literary device you might use, or belief systems you tap into – if you can make a story true for the reader, if you can give them a glimpse into another way of seeing the world, or another way that they can cope with their problems, then that story is a succes.”

— Charles de Lint

184. “But this was what happened when you mined the past. You gave up control of the present.”

— Charles de Lint

185. “I can’t think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don’t care what form one’s art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it’s not doing its job. And I don’t mean just making things that are pretty.”

— Charles de Lint

186. “Just stories. You and me, everybody, we’re a set of stories, and what those stories are is what makes us what we are.”

— Charles de Lint

187. “Everything, everybody wanted to lay claim to a piece of your soul. And if they couldn’t have it, they made you pay for it in guilt.”

— Charles de Lint

188. “I don’t know,” Kerry said. “It doesn’t feel like any medicine I ever took before.” She raised a hand to her forehead. “It really does feel like a light, shining inside me. How did you put it there?” Maida laughed. “You’re so funny! I didn’t put it there. Nobody can do that – not even Raven.” “But – ” “It was always there. I just made it a little brighter so that you could find it.”

— Charles de Lint

189. “There are no happy endings,” Cerin told her. “There are no real endings ever – happy or otherwise. We all have our own stories, which are just a part of the one Story that binds both this world and Faerie. Sometimes we step into each others’ stories – perhaps just for a few minutes, perhaps for years – and then we step out of them again. But all the while, the Story just goes on.”

— Charles de Lint

190. “She could have bad taste.” Jilly shakes her head. “Oh, no. She has impeccable taste. She’s our friend, isn’t she?”

— Charles de Lint

191. “Everything already talks,” Joe told her. “Plants, animals, even that old truck of mine. The trick is figuring out their language, learning to hear what they’re saying so that it makes sense.”

— Charles de Lint

192. “You need to take the world out of the box you put it in and accept it for what it is, not what you want it to be.”

— Charles de Lint

193. “I figure all oracular devices are just a way for us to focus on what we already know, but can’t quite grab onto. It works the same as a ritual does in a church: You get enough people focused on something, things happen. The way I see it is, it doesn’t much matter what the device is. It’s just got to be interesting enough so that your attention doesn’t stray. Fellow reading the fortune, fellow having it read – same difference. They’ve both got to be paying attention. “What.”

— Charles de Lint

194. “She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, but she was a bit like a cat herself, forever wandering in the woods, chasing after squirrels and rabbits as fast as her skinny legs could take her when the fancy struck, climbing trees like a possum, able to doze in the sun at a moment’s notice. And sometimes with no notice at all.”

— Charles de Lint

195. “Live intensely,” Joe tells me. “Live big. The cousins have a saying: ‘Walk large as trees, with the blood quick in you and swift-running.’ In other words, don’t let there be holes in your life where somebody else can creep into your head...”

— Charles de Lint

196. “I don’t think the world is the way we like to think it is. I don’t think it’s one solid world, but many, thousands upon thousands of them – as many as there are people – because each person perceives the world in his or her own way; each lives in his or her own world. Sometimes they connect, for a moment, or more rarely, for a lifetime, but mostly we are alone, each living in our own world, suffering our small deaths.”

— Charles de Lint

197. “If all the darkness each of us carries within us, all our angers and unhappiness and bad moments were pulled out of us and given shape, we would all create monsters.”

— Charles de Lint

198. “What Jilly liked best about him was his theory of consensual reality, the idea that things exist because we agree that they exist.”

— Charles de Lint

199. “There is no event so momentous that it hasn’t been seen before, no trouble so grand that won’t look small from another perspective.”

— Charles de Lint

200. “When someone Saw into that world, of course it would be startling, even frightening, because what she saw then was a mirror reflecting back the mysterious reaches within her own hidden self. The more imaginative a person was, the more able to suspend her disbelief, the truer the image would seem. The more real. Especially since such moments must spring up out of one’s subconscious;...”

— Charles de Lint